Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Public Enemy's explosive 1989 hit single brought hip-hop to the mainstream -- and brought revolutionary anger back to pop.
Jun 3, 2002 | Few moments in music history were as earth-shattering, as galvanizing and exhilarating, as the summer of 1989 when a black man in a baseball cap and a goofball sporting a giant clock necklace commanded America to Fight the Powers that Be.
Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" will hold a place in pop music's canon long after its authors have left our collective memory, even after hip-hop morphs into whatever new form it will inevitably take. Like "Do the Right Thing," the Spike Lee film to which it was tied, the song broke at a crucial period in America's struggle with race, capturing both the psychological and social conflicts of the time. Unabashedly political, "Fight the Power" was confrontational in the way great rock has always been. It had the kind of irreverence that puts bands on FBI lists. "Fight" demanded action and, as the band's most accessible hit, acted as the perfect summation of its ideology and sound. Every kid in America, white, black or brown, could connect to the song's uncompromising cultural critique, its invigoratingly danceable sound and its rallying call.
And who could blame them? Ultimately, parachute pants and Flock of Seagulls haircuts couldn't quell the frustrations of the Me Decade. The presidential tag team of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. had dismantled a battery of social programs, squashing urban communities already struggling with poverty, guns and violence. Crack ravaged the inner city. AIDS rocked the nation. Black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, tried to bathe America's race problem in as bright a spotlight as possible. The artistic community, already defiant in the face of Reagan-era conservatism, became even more provocative. The '80s gave us Robert Mapplethorpe, the U2 of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," Darling Nikki.
Rap had already seeped into the mainstream, heightening the senses of a culture steeped in early '80s frivolity. By the middle of the decade, rappers turned into megastars as rivals from the East and West Coasts splintered into bands of hardcore social critics like Boogie Down Productions, menacing gangstas like NWA and Ice-T, or artsy hip-hop MCs like De La Soul.
On this explosive cultural landscape rap had created, Public Enemy was a bomb attack. Producer Hank Shocklee, with his riotous Bomb Squad, created a sound unlike any other in rap music. Pulsing with noisy air sirens, thrashing guitar licks, sonorous bass lines and chaotic samples, P.E. could be louder than metal, funkier than soul. Enfolding those sounds around the booming, preacherlike rhythm of rapper Chuck D's rich baritone was, as Shocklee once said, like putting "the voice of God in a storm." The music brought urgency to the band's message, while their concerts, videos and record covers spelled out the vision. P.E. stage shows, complete with beret-wearing, Uzi-toting militiamen led by "Minister of Information" Professor Griff, often seemed more like a paramilitary dry run or a Black Panther revival meeting than a pop concert.
But while many hip-hop artists of the time created lyrical snapshots of the ways racism devastated their personal lives, P.E. always explained the bigger picture. Songs on their first albums, "Yo, Bum Rush the Show" and "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," read like the black community's 95 Theses: class anger, corporate exploitation, appropriation of black culture. Chuck D's lyrics were loaded with cultural and religious references -- most controversially, to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan -- that challenged both American government and its docile citizenry. By 1989, Public Enemy was more than a rap act, it was a social movement.
"Fight the Power" ripped open a space for the band to take its proper place in the cultural mainstream. With "Fight," P.E. stood alongside not only their hip-hop peers, but also legendary musical innovators and activists. Though it harked back to '60s and '70s protest music with its call for political engagement, the song surpassed its predecessors with its unbridled fury.
Not only did "Fight" epitomize an alienated nation frustrated by class conflict and lack of social progress, it told us what to do. It told us to revolt.
Erupting in a crescendo of drums and blistering samples, "Fight" begins with a pow, crashing like a fist against the senses. P.E.'s combustible Bomb Squad once again fused an anarchic mix of sounds into one synchronous and invigorating composition; alarms sound and basses thump as a groovy yet caustic guitar riff moves over staccato rhythms. Deep within the musical blizzard, a woman's salty voice sings, "Come on, get down." The Squad's disruptive blend of street noise and old-school funk is the sonic counterpart to the rage and discipline of Chuck's rhymes. You don't know whether to dance or stand at attention.
From inside the storm, Chuck D comes out swinging, verbally hacking into scraps a roster of American icons: "Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant shit to me, you see/ Straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain/ Motherfuck him and John Wayne." Arguably the most fearless lyric in all of popular music, this anti-ode to Elvis and John Wayne is a virtual flag-burning. Who better embodies the American ideal than Duke and the King, bumbling patriots who personified the nation's illiberal character and defended its order, an order from which blacks had been routinely barred? Chuck D cutting them up so brazenly was like a spiritual emancipation for anyone who felt excluded from American culture. In making a mockery of two of the country's greatest heroes, P.E. assailed white America's fairy-tale world and boldly accepted their place at its margins.
Chuck goes on, "I'm ready and hyped plus I'm amped/ Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps/ Sample a look back you look and find/ Nothing but rednecks for 400 years if you check." History looks very different when seen through the eyes of the oppressed. In '89, Americans were only beginning to grasp the profound sense of disaffection minorities felt in a culture that had made heroes out of those who historically abused them or to whom they had little cultural connection. Chuck told us that those heroes did nothing for him or his people and that the advantages they created for Americans were never enjoyed by blacks. So what meaning could they have? His confrontational tone and the near-blasphemy of the words could make a lump rise in your throat. You couldn't believe he said it, but you were glad he did.
